IMAGE SYSTEM 23
repetition motif through the mirroring of events and images are also used throughout the story: Dae-su sees his reflec-tion on the photo album when he uncovers Woo-jin’s scheme, Woo-jin’s sister stares at her reflection on a mirror while she has an affair with her brother, a hypnotist makes Dae-su use his reflection on a window to erase the memory of his inces-tuous affair, and Woo-jin’s revenge scheme is built around making Dae-su fall in love and commit incest with a family member, mirroring events from his life.
Oldboy
also uses repetition in a variety of ways to support the core ideas of the film, amplifying the dramatic impact of the story. Figure 1 shows a painting that Dae-su stares at throughout his imprisonment; it has an inscription that reads “Laugh, and the world laughs with you. Weep, and you weep alone” (a quotation from
Solitude
, a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox). After he is released, he recites this line un-der his breath a number of times, whenever he finds himself in a dire situation usually set up by Woo-jin. The expression on the face in the painting is ambiguous, making it difficult to tell if its subject (a man with wild hair that resembles Dae-su) is smiling or crying. Figure 2 is from one of the last shots in the film, shown after Dae-su has apparently erased the memory of his incest and reunites with his daughter. Like the man in the painting, it is difficult to tell if Dae-su is smil-ing or crying, suggesting the horrible possibility that he still remembers the incestuous affair he was tricked into having. His grimace would be heart-wrenching to watch even if the audience did not have the context added by its similarity with the face in the painting and the theme of solitude evoked by the poem, but the visual connection between them and the poem makes this moment in the narrative even more emo-tionally and psychologically complex